June 8 to August 7, 2016
643 Park Avenue (between 66th and 67th streets)
New York, 212 616 3930

Middlebrow culture has long been a contentious territory: it was critically viewed by Modernists as an ineffective attempt to water down and vulgarize innovative cultural endeavors, to produce a faux intellectual lifestyle that can be mass-produced for its status and entertainment value. Post-Modernists deemed the middlebrow edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive in its eclectic appropriation of the pretenses of a high culture, and their insertion into the everyday world of its audience. Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed embraces middlebrow culture: his art is for those who want to be in on the joke. One painting is a joke about Jackson Pollock, a video refers to Piero Manzoni’s cans of the artist’s shit, stacked chairs and battered cardboard boxes nod to Sol LeWitt and Minimalism, his paintings in varied styles are about taste(less-ness).

“The Back Door,” now at the Park Avenue Armory, surveys work from Creed’s more than 20-year-long career. The exhibition’s title can be taken in any number of ways — servants, trades people and less than respectable visitors come to the back door. It also has some naughty sexual connotations as it refers to anal sex. While I’m sure that this title was meant to conjure up these associations, in this case it quite literally, refers to the actual rear door of the Armory, which Creed has motorized so that it continuously opens and closes. That piece is titled Shutters Opening and Closing (2016) and offers three events in one: the slow opening of the doors, the simultaneous dramatic shedding of light into the almost empty, cavernous interior of the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, and finally a glimpse of people walking by on Lexington Ave. This brought to my mind the allegory of Plato’s Cave, in that Creed implies that we, the audience, live in a shadow world and that without his reminder, we would not be aware that just outside, real living beings go on with their lives unconcerned with what is going on in the Armory.

There are four other pieces scattered throughout that employ the on/off, open/close theme; one is in the big corridor, where a massive set of curtains, usually decorously tied back, hang loose, endlessly opening and closing. In the elaborate Veterans Room, a white grand piano on an oriental rug, slowly opens only to immediately slam shut with a resounding bang. The other is the backdoor to the Parlor Room, called A Door Opening and Closing (1995), behind which, in the Parlor, The Lights Going On and Off (1996) is enacted by two rows of white, globular lights hanging from the ceiling. In combining these two works he has synchronized the so when the door is closed the lights are on and when the door is open the lights are off.

The only thing that occupies the Drill Hall is a large screen hung from the ceiling on which six videos are screened. These three-minute-long videos play alternately with the opening and closing of the rear door. The videos are of different women of various ages and in varied settings. The camera slowly zooms in on each woman’s mouth; when it arrives at its destination she opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue to reveal half-eaten foods stuffs, then closes her mouth to swallow. The seemingly obvious reference for these benignly undignified videos are those porn films in which women showily take cum in their mouths and then swallow.

In a series of small rooms along one side of the Drill Hall, a retrospective of Creed’s videos has been installed, one to a room. In one, against an immaculate white ground, young Asian women squat to take a shit, in another video we are again given a clean, white space in which different women enter the frame to repeatedly induce vomiting so as to produce a Pollock-like “painting” on the floor. A third video gives a close-up of a single female breast as a disembodied/decontextualized sex object. As for videos of men, there is one in which a man angrily smashes bouquets of flowers against the floor and another, shot like a home movie, in which the artist in bathing trunks is shown at the beach, wiggling about striking various pin-up poses that allude to both male and female, soft-core porn. These videos, which are meant to represent Creed’s investigation into the basic tenets of human existence, though often pathetic and dehumanizing, actually verge on the banal.

Beyond the videos, Creed has painted the upper walls of the Armory’s grand corridor and staircase with a pattern of diagonal black bars, which break for the many portraits, architectural woodwork, display cases and his own paintings. In the rooms along this corridor, Creed has installed his paintings and sculptures. Subsequently, in the Colonel’s Reception Room he has installed Work No. 2497: half the air in a given space (2015). It promises to be a crowd pleaser, the room half-filled with large white balloons is a tight squeeze for visitors moving through it. The work is akin to an oversized ball pit, like those children play in at Chuck E. Cheese restaurants. In other rooms, such as the Library and the Field and Staff Rooms, he has installed sculptures made by stacking battered cardboard boxes on top of one another in descending size. Others consist of likewise stacks of secondhand furniture. Other sculptures use stacking and repetition, as with an 8 foot high stack of half-inch-thick sheets of plywood, which is as high as the sheets are long. In the Library, he has placed numerous small objects, among them a progression of potted cacti (Work No. 2376, 2016), and a nod to the days of protest against the military and war, he has installed in a display densely packed with mostly silver trophies, two small clenched fists — one gold-plated, the other bronze — as such reminding us that context is everything.

Creed is part prankster, designer, dilettante and entertainer, and he’s completely serious about the sampling of borderline banal contrasts, ludicrous situations. So much of Creed’s work refers to easy art, and to easy, tchotchke-like “folk” forms — virtuosity is antithetical to his homemade mode. Staged as a non-spectacle, this survey of new and older works is intent on engaging and potentially provoking his audience to consider each work or encounter as an act of (perhaps bad) faith. All of this is so well balanced as to be indeterminable as to whether it is implicitly culturally critical in its silliness, or if the joke’s on us for thinking so. All of this brings me to the conclusion that Creed is clever in the ways he turns the challenging endeavors of his predecessors into something accessible and playfully minor. But, then again this is part of the definition of what it is to be middlebrow.

The post Back Door Man: Martin Creed at the Park Avenue Armory appeared first on artcritical.

December 5, 2012 to January 6, 2013
643 Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th streets
New York City, (212) 616-3930

Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem ‘The Swing’ (from A Child’s Garden of Verses) offers an ebullient summons to Ann Hamilton’s wondrous new work at the Park Avenue Armory. A line from Stevenson sails into mind as—in the company of visitors ranging in age from infancy to near dotage, including portly businessmen whose well-cut jacket flaps trail behind them like the tails of flying fish—-I ascend weightless, airborne on one of 42 wooden plank swings.  Reminiscent of garment workers’ benches, these are suspended by chains some 70 feet from the drill hall ceiling . “Up in the air I go flying again,/ Up in the air and down!”  These blissful words might well have been known to the artist’s grandmother, who is lovingly credited by the artist as a prime source of inspiration for this entrancing piece.

The Gothic Revival Park Avenue Armory , erected just five years before the poem’s publication in 1885, provides a perfect venue for Hamilton’s swings, her 42 pigeons in miniature, stacked dovecotes, and the immense white silken fabric that billows from on high, responsively rising and falling according to the visitors’ velocities as they sway on their swings, pushed often by perfect strangers.  And the site irresistibly harks back to that other Armory, the one where in 1913 Modern Art erupted upon America.  Like Theodore Roosevelt back then, New York Times critic Roberta Smith (reviewing this show on December 6) wonders whether what surrounds us inside these Armory walls is art.  But, oh! It is!

Looming vast and drafty, 250 by 150 feet, the uncanny erstwhile home to military maneuvers, Wade Thompson Drill Hall seems forbidding at first glance. Lit dimly by Hamilton’s cunning lighting design, its awe and tremendum could easily dwarf anyone cursed with even a trace of agoraphobia. But any initial frisson of anxiety soon dissipates, for one of the triumphs of the art is how it “meets” that presenting enormity of space and—to borrow the verb chosen by the artist herself—“animates’ it.  She tames it but without completely sacrificing its inherent wildness.  Intimations of ambivalence about wildness abound as we enter the hall and try ourselves out in its immensity. Live pigeons, for example, greet our view, but caged, not free (at least most of the time, for there is a plan to release them once each day).  Pigeons, moreover, we note, are members of the same genus as doves (columbidae), which are symbols of peace; thus concord enters symbolically into a place devoted to the trappings of war.  And Emily Dickinson’s delicate trembling comes to mind, for, just as she, with her poesy, engages and magnifies the infinitesimal, so Ann Hamilton, artisan and conceptual visual artist, gentles, for us, the savage enormity of gargantuan space.

Hamilton’s enigmatic title strings words together that don’t at first make sense: for how can there be an event of a thread?  But wait!  ‘Event’ denotes not simply a happening but an outcome, as it joins the Latin prefix ‘ex,’ meaning ‘out,’ with ‘venire,’ meaning ‘to come.’ The outcome of a thread, when we parse it, takes us back to weaving, the craft with which Ann Hamilton began her trade as an artist.  And the outcome of a thread can be, indeed must be, open, free, undecidable.  This realization leads to an astonishing feature of the piece, namely, a large glass window seemingly cut through the exterior wall on the Armory’s Lexington side (in fact, this was achieved by rolling up a garage door and inserting glass) expressly as a way to release the work from its confines within the building and expand its metaphoric extension into the city streets.

Quality of attention matters profoundly.  Imagine readers in furry capes sitting beside pigeons and reading aloud to them—words of complex texts, which are simultaneously transmitted into paper bag radios scattered about the floor of the Armory, among the swings, so that visitors can pick them up and carry them hither and yon. Through them, we become attuned to the notion that listening intently for individual words so as to catch their meaning only causes us to miss everything else that is going on in the space around us: our driven, unilateral search for logical connection lures us away from greater proto-logical and trans-logical states of mind and of being. Hamilton’s dense texts moreover cannot be followed logically, for they mirror woven fabrics, where the warp-and-woof is what matters.  We become like pigeons, who attend on a wholly other plane, or like children too young to grasp the intended meaning but not to feel embraced by the warmth of the reading human voice.

The Sufi epic by Farid al-din ‘Attar floated into consciousness as I swung through Hamilton’s installation.  In this work, paradox, reversal and mystery reveal truths inaccessible by the tools of reason and where, as led by the hoopoe bird, feathered creatures of all sorts (Hamilton’s pigeons) go in search of the unknown Simorgh.  Simorgh is found in the end by means of a mirror, just as one is set up in this piece to reflect the Armory space and its visitors while the transparent window extends it all in another direction.  Antimonies unsteadily holds truth, like a swing:   large and minute, individual and communal, human and animal, war and peace, inside and out, voice and motion (the rhythm of the spoken words, for example, which reiterate synaesthetically the back-and-forth motion of swinging).  And high and low, as the swings are attached by giant pulleys to the billowing white oceans of fabric which, suspended from the ceiling, extend across the entire space of the Armory hall.  By the most gossamer of threads— of silk and of sound—connections proliferate.

Gertrude Stein, in her celebrated 1935 essay ‘Pictures,’ seeks to separate the notion of literary idea from visual one.  Ann Hamilton blends these in her work.  By so doing, she unwittingly and uncannily evokes Stein; their streams of consciousness mutually establish intricate filaments of connection.  And one small wise child, standing at the entrance to the drill hall remarked: This is not like play, but like “wonder!”

The post Gentling The Savage Enormity Of Gargantuan Space: Ann Hamilton at the Armory appeared first on artcritical.

December 3, 2010 – January 6, 2011
643 Park Avenue at 66th Street
New York City, (212) 616-3930

If ever the art-going public needed a reminder of the wisdom of the dictum “show, don’t tell,” it needs look no further than Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway, on view now at the Park Avenue Armory.

Greenaway, a filmmaker long fascinated with the visual arts, is well known for films (The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982; Nightwatching, 2007) in which artists and their creations are central figures. With his series “Nine Classical Paintings Revisited,” begun in 2006, Greenaway has gone directly to the source, selecting acknowledged masterpieces from the canon as the objects of a digital-age reappraisal. Greenaway’s vision is presented to us in three acts played out in two adjoining spaces that are set off by giant digital screens massive enough not to be dwarfed by the Amory’s cavernous unlit drill hall.

The first act sets the scene of Renaissance Italy through Greenaway’s awesome command of the technological landscape, like the opening orientation at the IMAX Theatre where all the audio/visual bells and whistles are explained so that one doesn’t faint midway through the show. Tremendously vivid digital and animated images are presented in 360-degrees on four massive screens surrounding the audience and a fifth screen on the floor (it can be walked on), all backed by a powerful, violin-fueled audio track. Act two includes a full-scale replica of the original chapel for which The Last Supper was commissioned in Milan. Here Greenaway presents his interpretation of Leonardo’s masterpiece, before returning to the first room for Act Three, an exploration of the Paolo Veronese’s painting The Wedding at Cana.

Greenaway uses his vast technological vocabulary to give a virtuosic audio-visual tour of these two great paintings as he re-imagines and re-presents them chiefly by altering lighting conditions to explore their space.

At one point in The Last Supper, the light emerges from Jesus’ figure alone, casting shadows over the entire tableaux as if it existed in the round. Later, a point of light dances through the space, leaving a vapor trail, that traces the path it has traveled.

Composition, too, is explored through the illumination of various aspects of the painting against a dark ground. The apostles’ heads alone are lit, then their feet. Their hands­—gesturing, pointing, clutching—are bathed in a warm light, a rhythm of abstract shapes playing across the surface of the painting. In this way Greenaway literally gives each aspect of the painting its moment in the sun.

In one compelling contrast, diagonal shafts of light emerge from the grid in the ceiling in the painting, filtering over Jesus and his apostles from behind and presenting them as solid sculptural masses. This is followed by a similar movement of light from a window in the chapel, which moves flatly over the painting, revealing it as a two-dimensional surface. Although the painted surface is flat, somehow for a moment one expects the figures again to be sculpted volumes. It is this kind of set-up that delights Greenaway. Look what can be done with light and space! In these moments the experience is truly magnificent.

To go from The Last Supper to The Wedding at Cana, as presented here, is to go from looking at a painting with a friend to looking through the eyes of a literal-minded museum docent. A didactic audio track picks apart the painting’s composition, effectively killing the mood. Not only is the delight of mutual discovery gone, the content of the lecture is a major disappointment. To hear Greenaway tell it, Veronese’s chief accomplishment as a painter is to put the figure of Jesus smack-dab in the middle of his composition.

The most magical moment of the entire experience is in the final scene. The 120-plus figures that make up the composition of Wedding at Cana are reduced to bright white contour lines against a black ground. For a moment they are held there, in their actual relationship on the surface of the painting. But then something marvelous happens, as we go from seeing this world head-on to seeing it from a partial bird’s-eye view, as if lifted twenty feet above the wedding party. Looking on from above, one can’t help but smile in wonder at the vast three-dimensional space Veronese compressed into his painting.

To levitate above a painting and for a moment to experience the world of that panting in three dimensions is Greenaway’s great gift to us. In showing us his exploration of light, space, volume and composition, Greenaway succeeds because he trusts us to make discoveries alongside him. It is only in the telling, when this essential process of discovery is undermined, that Greenaway’s vision fails.

At its best, Greenaway’s work remains a tremendous homage to painting. In all its technological wizardry, it never loses sight of the greatest wizardry of all: the painter’s depiction of a three-dimensional world on an unapologetically two-dimensional surface.

The post Leonardo on Park Avenue, Courtesy of Peter Greenaway appeared first on artcritical.